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This Lad's Life: Write, Ogle. Rewrite, Ogle. Drink, Ogle. Repeat.

In "Lads: A Memoir of Manhood," a former associate editor at Maxim, Dave Itzkoff, takes a baseball bat to his former employer, suggesting that behind the facade of rollicking lads and willing females, the magazine was a gulag where overworked and underpaid editors labored endlessly to come up with something -- anything -- that would sustain the magazine's monstrous newsstand sales.

But he reserves his most unalloyed scorn and invective for himself. When Mr. Itzkoff, 28 and now an editor at Spin magazine, decides to open up a vein, he uses a butcher knife. "Lads" describes the life of a hapless schlub in romantic affairs, a charlatan in professional matters and a loser in the game of life.

Yes, Mr. Itzkoff's tenure at Maxim, which lasted from 1999 to 2002, is full of buffoonish editors and craven office high jinks. But these are contrasted with his own miserable existence, full of loneliness and extremely detailed episodes of self-gratification, as well as tales of a father who suffers a cocaine overdose. There is the promise of fun on the cover, but this, too, is illusory: the outlines of a condom are pressed into the leather of a wallet, but it looks as if it has been there a long time.

While at Maxim, Mr. Itzkoff managed to dabble in potent drugs, interview many seemingly available starlets and drink prodigiously, but the sexual conquests that are the leitmotif of the magazine he worked at constantly eluded him. At one particularly pathetic moment, he calls an escort service, making sure to take down his Princeton diploma from the wall before the prostitute arrives. He is a cartoon, but a dark one.

Mr. Itkoff's five-story walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side has all the accouterments of a lad in good standing. There is the Harvey Keitel action-figure doll from "Reservoir Dogs," two different video game consoles and preserved backstage passes from various events. But there is also that diploma, a huge shelf of Important Books, alphabetized, of course, and Mr. Itzkoff himself. He is a small, boyish man who could slip unnoticed into any of the better prep schools on the Upper East Side. By no means is Mr. Itzkoff a lad's lad, a fact of life that made his time at the magazine both exhilarating and toxic.

"I don't deny the experiences I had there and that some of it was fun," he said. "I just wanted people to know that there is a price to be paid for it."

Mr. Itzkoff writes that the Maxim ideal of a man of leisure was a complete fantasy, especially to the young editors who wrote and rewrote every page of the magazine deep into the night to satisfy the whims of various editors.

Mr. Itzkoff was able to keep cognitive dissonance at bay for a time, ferociously defending Maxim in an interview with The New York Press in November 2000. But after he left the magazine in 2002, he appeared again in that weekly, this time writing that he believed that the magazine, which stormed the American newsstand with a British-inflected band of humor, had lost its way, doomed to repeating the same jokes in ever more salacious ways. (The article became the basis for "Lads.")

"Maxim used to be Larry David, now it's Larry Flynt," he said last week. "Its sensibility at one time was very welcoming, and it used to celebrate the short-comings of the reader, but now it just exploits them."

Indeed, Maxim's newsstand sales are down 15.8 percent in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year,, and the magazine now finds itself fighting for attention in a culture it has influenced profoundly. With everything from competing spinoffs, beer commercials and programs like "The Jimmy Kimmel Show" reflecting a bawdy, goofball mentality, it is difficult for the magazine to stick out as it once did. And its fundamental value proposition, that if one stares long enough at the underclothed starlet, the remaining scraps of garment will fall away, seems anachronistic when dozens of Web sites are devoted to uncensored photographs of unclothed celebrities. .

The book seems less an attempt to cash in on the heat that romans à clef about the publishing world have generated -- "The Devil Wears Prada," a thinly veiled story about life at Vogue sold very well -- than a kind of exorcism, a violent purging from a normally quiet, well-mannered kid from Princeton. But what could be a banal rendering of someone who got in too deep at a tender age is elevated by the telling. Mr. Itzkoff is a very screwed-up guy, but he is a screwed-up guy who can write, a brainy, vivid update of Woody Allen played through the prism of "The Man Show."

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He explains the criteria for a Maxim cover model in this way: "The subject must be female and must be willing to appear in a state of undress. She should be famous enough to enough to sell magazines yet obscure enough to consent to a photo shoot that might depict her cupping her bare breasts in her own hands."

And, at the same time, he suggests that producing a relentlessly upbeat magazine about the man who has mastered bawdy living led him to experience a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr. Itzkoff is an emotional young man -- he got a vicious case of shingles while he worked at the magazine -- who cries early and often in his book, and in an interview; he also quotes Iago from memory. (The quote also opens his book.)

"I have looked upon the world for four times seven years," he said, through tears, "and since I could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury, I have never found man that knew how to love himself." That's a long way from the shark attacks and Nazi jokes that are the magazine's staple.

Many of his former editors come in for rugged treatment in "Lads," some by name, and some by pseudonym. Keith Blanchard, himself a former editor of Maxim, is depicted as a half-punched-in philistine, while James Kaminsky, an editor who went on to work at Playboy, comes off as conflicted and tortured about the task at hand. Mr. Kaminsky, who has since become a vice president of special projects at Playboy, said he had no special comment on Mr. Itzkoff's book, beyond saying, "I think it was inevitable that someone would try to capture the lad phenomena."

For all the pain, Mr. Itzkoff appears glad that someone is him. "This is a pristine record of how I felt and what I suffered," he said. "It is a fair trade, I think, to have that kind of memento 20 years from now."

A.J. Baime, an editor who worked at Maxim with Mr. Itzkoff and now works with him at Spin (and who appears in the book), said, "Let's just say that it is a true account of what he experienced there."

His former employers, however, disagree.

"Since his departure, Dave has been a prototypical disgruntled ex-employee," said Drew Kerr, a spokesman for the magazine. "He is sadly trying to cash in on his short time at Maxim by saying anything to anybody who will listen to him."

Mr. Itzkoff, ever the pessimist, doubts the book will sell much. He etches his own predisposition early in the book.

"Look, any fair-minded boy with a professionally bonded smile on his face and a Carpenters song in his head can be an optimist. Being a pessimist -- now that requires faith in one's convictions, a negative capability that would make Keats stand on tiptoes and above all else, creativity."

Given the manifest neuroses of the author, the book ends predictably enough in a shrink's office, where Mr. Itzkoff and his father settle in for some long-term therapy. A book, after all, can only do so much.

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A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2004, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: This Lad's Life: Write, Ogle. Rewrite, Ogle. Drink, Ogle. Repeat. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe